Untitled
by SomewhereApart
Summary: After Cooper finally gets his much-needed shower, he and Charlotte spend some time talking about one of their girls, and what comes next.


_**Author's Note: **__For Afrouz, who requested something to read._

* * *

After dinner, Cooper finally gets that shower, and when he emerges, the sight that greets him both surprises him and warms his heart: Charlotte is in bed, a nursing pillow on her lap, one of their beautiful, blonde daughters' heads cradled in the crook of her arm. Charlotte's smiling down at her, and he likes to think she's so in love she can't even bear to pull her gaze away long enough to look at him when she asks, "Feel better?"

"God, yes," he sighs, easing carefully onto the bed and scooting over until he can peek down on the baby at her breast. Georgia. "She wake up?"

It's a dumb question; of course she did.

"Mmhmm," Charlotte confirms, drawing her fingers down over the sky blue fabric of Georgia's sleeve. "Thought she was hungry, but she's not workin' very hard to fill her belly."

"She ate earlier," Cooper tells her, stroking Georgia's head softly. "But not very well. She's been fussy today."

Charlotte's mouth draws into a frown, and she settles her hand over Georgia's brow. "Maybe she's comin' down with somethin'," she frets, and Georgia sighs, and sucks more rapidly for a few seconds, then settles down into the easy pace she'd been nursing before. She looks up at her Momma, and Charlotte gazes down at her, draws a fingertip over her chubby cheek, down her sleeve again. When she gets to Georgia's hand, the baby stretches her hand, then grasps Charlotte's finger and holds on.

Cooper's heart stutters with an unbearable kind of love he didn't know he could feel until he was a husband and father, watching his wife and daughter love on each other like this. If every parenting moment was like this, he'd do it all day and night without question or complaint.

"Maybe," he suggests, "she just wanted her Momma."

He watches as Charlotte smiles, and then finally looks up at him, nodding and grinning as she says, "Maybe you're right." She looks back at Georgia, and in that sugary-sweet voice she reserves only for their kids, she asks, "Is your daddy right, precious girl? Did you just want me all to yourself for a bit? Hmm?"

Georgia blinks sleepily at her, opens her hand, closes it again around Charlotte's finger. For a few minutes, they all just bask in each other. Georgia's nursing slows to a crawl, her eyes close, her mouth falling lax against Charlotte's nipple as she slips into a snooze. That's when Charlotte admits, "Sometimes, I think about how close we came to losin' her, and I can't bear the thought of ever letting her go. Even to put her down for the night."

"I know the feeling," Cooper agrees, although lately, with the constant cycle of screaming and feeding and pooping the babies seem to be in, he'd had a hard time remembering to be grateful. So he takes a moment to remember those early days, when she was the only one of their girls to have barreled her way into this world, and they all lived in a constant state of flux and fear as she battled for life.

And then his wife says something that hits him like a brick: "If we'd reduced, we'd have lost her," she says quietly. No accusation, just the facts: "She was closest. It would've been her."

And he'd pushed so hard for her to reduce, he remembers. He'd wanted to make sure he had her and as many healthy babies as he could manage, so he'd wanted to sacrifice one of their girls for the good of the others. But she'd refused, undeterred by his reasoning, unwilling to give up one of the babies she'd spent every day cursing the existence of in the first place. He's never been more grateful for her stubbornness.

"Thank you," he tells her, leaning in and pressing a kiss to her shoulder, speaking into the fabric there. "Thank you for not listening to me."

She smirks, and turns her head to meet his gaze. And then that smirk goes sharper, grows into something a little more mischevious as she asks, "You know how you can thank me?"

"How?" he asks, game for pretty much anything, but not sure he trusts that look on her face.

She glances down at his lap, and tells him, "Snip, snip."

Cooper scowls. "What?"

"Now that we're gettin' a nanny, I want you to get a vasectomy," she clarifies, and Cooper is thinking he was right to be mistrusting. And that he wants to steal Georgia's nursing pillow to protect his manhood. "I didn't ask sooner, because you were gonna be takin' care of the girls every day, and I just went back to work, so takin' a couple days off while you recover fully wouldn't be convenient. But if there's gonna be someone else here takin' care of the girls, I want you to get that thing snipped as soon as possible."

Cooper's frown deepens. "No."

"No?" Her brows lift slightly.

"No," he tells her again. "That seems a little harsh - and permanent."

"Oh, hush," she chides him, which he thinks is really unnecessary. "They're not entirely permanent - we could do a reversal if we went God's-honest crazy and decided we want more kids. But in the meantime, I'm married to a man whose supersperm has fathered four accidental children. You want to make it five?"

He really, really doesn't. At least, not right now, while they're still drowning in diapers, and breast milk, and spit up. But still... That's his junk she wants someone to go hacking at. He whines a little, makes a pleading face. "Really? Now?"

Charlotte gives a little shrug, then looks him up and down, and says, "Alright, I can compromise," in a way he's sure means she really can't. Sure enough, her "compromise" really sucks: "You don't have to get a vasectomy. We can just use condoms until I hit menopause."

Cooper makes a sound of grumpy disapproval, then slumps back into his pillows. "Not fair."

"Totally fair," she insists. "Until you're the one with Addison rootin' around up in your torso and yankin' tiny bodies out, I think it's totally fair I get a say in when we have more babies, and you've already managed to twart the birth control."

"So what are the odds of it happening again?"

"Will you at least think about it?" she asks him, and Cooper figures that's not so bad. That's an actual compromise - letting him think about it.

So he nods, and says, "Fine. Yes. I'll think about it."

And just as they fall silent again, he hears the first disgruntled squawk from the baby monitor. One of the other girls is awake.

When the baby lets out a full-on cry, he starts thinking that maybe the whole vasectomy business isn't that bad of an idea after all.


End file.
